Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Days af­ter the trav­el re­stric­tion was an­nounced by Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, sev­er­al trav­ellers who re­cent­ly trav­elled to Chi­na were let in­to the coun­try.

The rev­e­la­tion came on the heels of a Chi­nese na­tion­al’s case hav­ing to be ad­journed by High Court judge Hay­den St Clair-Dou­glas at the Hall of Jus­tice in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day morn­ing, due to con­cerns over the coro­n­avirus.

Yan Fang Hong, 47, who was due to ap­pear in court yes­ter­day, left Chi­na on Thurs­day and en­tered the coun­try through a con­nect­ing flight in New York on Feb­ru­ary 1. (See ar­ti­cle be­low)

Asked how Hong could en­ter the coun­try af­ter the ban was an­nounced on Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 30, Deyals­ingh said: “The Pres­i­dent had to sign off on that or­der which she did on the 31st. The Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) has to sign off an or­der and that was done on the 31st. Im­mi­gra­tion has to be alert­ed. So al­though Cab­i­net took the de­ci­sion on Thurs­day 30, it would take some time to the pol­i­cy to reach down on the ground to Im­mi­gra­tion.”

Deyals­ingh was un­able to in­di­cate when the or­der reached Im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cials and said he would need to find out from At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi. Guardian Me­dia at­tempt­ed to reach Chief Im­mi­gra­tion Of­fi­cer Char­maine Gand­hi-An­drews, Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young and AG Faris Al-Rawi to as­cer­tain when the or­der was of­fi­cial­ly im­ple­ment­ed. How­ev­er, no re­sponse was giv­en up to press time.

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram al­so re­vealed to Guardian Me­dia that “we would have had a cou­ple peo­ple com­ing through.”

While ac­knowl­edg­ing the de­lay in im­ple­ment­ing the re­stric­tion, he al­so of­fered a dif­fer­ent ex­pla­na­tion to Deyals­ingh’s, ex­plain­ing that a de­ci­sion was made to al­low in­to the coun­try, those trav­ellers who were al­ready en route to T&T when the re­stric­tion was an­nounced.

“It was ac­tu­al­ly on­ly now in ef­fect and what we had agreed is that peo­ple who were com­ing in that kind of grey area who had al­ready left their coun­tries of ori­gin. It’s un­fair for us as a coun­try to do a ban to­day and then peo­ple who are en route to turn them away be­cause they would not have known.”

“What we were do­ing is fol­low­ing them up for the 14 days to make sure they passed the in­cu­ba­tion pe­ri­od. And once they passed that pe­ri­od and have no symp­toms then fine. But if they have symp­toms at any point—we mon­i­tor them every day—and they have num­bers to call in the event that some­thing hap­pens at night and we would take them in­to hos­pi­tal and do the nec­es­sary test­ing.”

He said those trav­ellers are al­so equipped with the nec­es­sary equip­ment such as face masks and have a li­ai­son through the coun­ty med­ical of­fi­cer.

How­ev­er, Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh in­di­cat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly say­ing in cas­es such as Hong’s, “they would be put in iso­la­tion just as we did with the stu­dent who came in.”

When con­tact­ed, Caribbean Air­lines com­mu­ni­ca­tion man­ag­er Dionne Ligoure told Guardian Me­dia: “Caribbean Air­lines is acute­ly aware of the coro­n­avirus and the air­line is proac­tive­ly en­sur­ing that mea­sures are in place to safe­guard its cus­tomers and crews.”

Dr Paras­ram it­er­at­ed that cur­rent­ly there aren’t any con­firmed or sus­pect­ed cas­es of the nov­el coro­n­avirus in the coun­try.